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Large Irish ISP To Enact "Three Strikes" Rule For Copyright Violation
Squeeonline writes "One of the biggest broadband providers in Ireland will make the country the first in the world (according to the broadsheet newspaper the Irish Times) to introduce the 'three strikes' rule. 'Eircom will from today begin a process that will lead to cutting off the broadband service of customers found to be repeatedly sharing music online illegally. Ireland is the first country in the world where a system of graduated response is being put in place. Under the pilot scheme, Eircom customers who illegally share copyrighted music will get three warnings before having their broadband service cut off for a year.' ... The mechanism by which it operates was challenged in the courts by the Data Protection Commissioner. Apparently, IP addresses do not constitute 'personal information.' Personally, I use filesharing all the time, but I use it to download large open source Linux ISOs. How will Eircom legally differentiate between that content, and the content that some ragamuffin may be downloading illegally, without infringing privacy laws?"
Welcome to guilty by association.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
found to be repeatedly sharing music online illegally
This simply isn't true.
What they will be doing is cutting off service to people who they are told, by a third party firm, are sharing copyrighted music. There is no decision of legality here because a court is not involved. Were they cutting off people who had been found, by a court of law, to have shared their music in violation of Irish copyright law, then you could use the word 'illegally'.
Journalism is hard though. If it was easy everybody would do it.
Personally, I use filesharing all the time, but I use it to download large open source Linux ISOs. How will Eircom legally differentiate between that content, and the content that some ragamuffin may be downloading illegally, without infringing privacy laws?
Well, since the article talks about searching for people who are sharing (not just downloading) specific works over P2P networks where the copyright is known to be held by the record companies, presumably they are only planning to go after those they've caught in the act.
I'm not a fan of either "three strikes" laws that impose penalties without a proper court hearing or going after people based on an IP address alone, but as the recent round of proposals have gone, this one seems to be about as reasonable as you're going to get in who it claims to be targetting.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
and while they're at it they should ban people from sidewalks when they make their own copies of florsheims.
Don't worry, they will get to Linux soon. Any distro that can play DVDs or decode MP3s or rip a CD or a DVD will be flagged as a problem and get added to the list of things you are not allowed to download.
And I'm sure now that the MPIAA and friends have gotten their way there will be many other organizations lining up with their lobbying contributions to get their favorite vice added to the list as well.
Did I read that Australia is banning pictures of adult women with A-cup sized breasts?
If this ever gets passed here in the U.S.A. I'm sure it will be illegal to download evolution texts soon.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
What the hell is this? A country race to see who can be the biggest corporate ass monkey the fastest?
"Best Customers" being Grandmas who pay fifty American dollars a month just to check e-mail.
There's no snowball-in-hell chance that they will NOT fuck it up. To be 100% certain that copyrighted material is being shared, they would have to actually download something from a certain IP and tell the ISP that this IP was infringing. If they have that, why not sue? So what will they do? Either compare hashes or even just go for filenames. Now, could anyone see a reason why a file other than a certain movie could be called "300.avi"?
It's pretty much certain that they will blunder somewhere. The only question now is whether they get away with it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Huh? You can still record from TV? :)
Seriously. No, you're not pirating. The station paid for the right to broadcast that song, and part of the fair use deal is (ok, was) that it's accepted that people will possibly record this broadcast for their personal use. In some countries, they used this to push a "tape fee" (or in the meantime, CDR/DVD-R fee) where you pay a certain amount per blank DVD to the music industry so this "kinda-sorta-infringment" is covered.
Which has become a very weak joke now that you can't really record anything anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The best customer is my dad. He uses about 10MB a month to check his email and maybe, once in a blue moon, open a webpage. And if for some reason the 'net breaks down, he shrugs and tries again tomorrow. That's the best customer an ISP could wish for.
The high bandwidth using filesharer that goes ballistic on their support line agents when the net breaks for 5 minutes is about the worst customer they could imagine.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
people that just do a bit of web surfing and email checking are always the ones on the scabby $24.95/mo plans that hardly make the ISP anything, it's the medium downloaders who get a few gigs off limewire and are on the $79 plan that makes isp's cash - typically the have more quota then they need just incase. these are the demographic that make up most of their customers. sure there's always a small subset that will download 100 gigs a month, but they are in the minority.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
DMCA takedown notices are constantly abused through youtube. Anyone think trolls will be in full effect with this?
Exactly. Plus the tech user / big downloader never rings the help line, while gramma is on there every second day. For an ISP, the best customers are the ones you never have to help.
More likely that they break a sweat and feel their heart racing and their trousers tightening as they stumble upon pics of 18 year old Japanese chicks or high school volleyball games.
Then they punish everybody else for their own guilt.
Or you could just send out a policy question email to your local government officials that requires a human response. And then use the message headers from any received emails to determine what time and what IP addresses they were attached to. From there, you track back the IP address range to the appropriate ISP (same DB as used by the music industry).
BAM! BAM! BAM! The government offices are locked out of the internet.
Any poor councillor that does some after hours emailing from their home account...BAM! BAM! BAM!
I've actually used DMCA notices against a user on Photobucket. I got a blank DMCA notice form, filled it in accurately, and claimed copywrite on an image that this user had posted. They never even questioned it. They black holed the image on the first one. They black holed the account on when he reposted, and I re-submitted. The guy gave up.
Point of the story, most of these companies aren't going to question ANYTHING on an even remotely legit looking DMCA notice. The relevant equivalent in any given country is likely to be treated more or less the same. The company doesn't want the responsibility for "checking" these notices out. So they don't even try.
We appear to have, as always in these matters, sanction on accusation. The subject is accused three times of having broken a law. The fourth time he is found to have done this (not by a court, but by a supplier of goods and services) his Internet connection is cut off for a week. Another time, and he is disconnected for a year.
At no point in this process do the courts intervene, and you will notice that the penalty is different from normal criminal sanctions, in that it is not either fine, community service, or imprisonment. There are some exceptions, some kinds of driving offences are punishable by withdrawal of permission to drive. But its rather rare, and the characteristic appears to be where there is a danger to the public, and where the sanction is directly related to the offense. We do not, for instance, ban someone from driving because he engaged in false accounting, or because he breached copyright. He drove while intoxicated, and we banned him from driving.
The problem with the disconnection penalty, apart from the fact that it is punishment on accusation, is that it is not an appropriate punishment for the crime. I have no truck with copyright breaches. They should be prosecuted before a court, and on conviction there should be punishments of the usual sorts, fines, community service, perhaps even jail terms in serious cases. But it makes no more sense to disconnect someone's house from the Internet than it does to ban him from driving in a case of false accounting. Or to ban him from shopping for food, because he has sold counterfeit goods in the local street market. Or to disconnect his phone. Or ban him from visiting public libraries, or using the bus service.
We need two things to deal with this matter in a way that has regard to civil liberties. One is that all punishment shall occur only when an offense is proven in court, and shall only be imposed by a court, not by a service provider. The second is that the punishment shall make sense in the scale of other offenses. Neither is true of the 'three strikes' proposals. The fact is, this breach of the law is no different from any other breach, and needs to be handled in exactly the same way as all others.
All you need is a copy of one of the form letters. Change the IP address on the letter. Done. You have to remember these complaints take up huge amounts of resources for the ISP and are not profitable at all. Even if they only have 1 employee on staff working them, think about how much that 1 employee costs them and they are generating no revenue at all. If you made it so they had to have 5 people working on this alone? 10 people? The more bogus complaints they get the more customers will start calling in saying WTF? So they'd need people to take those calls. Trust me, things would change rather quickly.
As an ISP, you have upstream providers (if you're small), and peers (if you're big). Both can disconnect you for whatever reason if they feel like it.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.